The Loop by Nicholas Evans

Author:Nicholas Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

19

Dan Prior was not a religious man. At his most indulgent, he considered faith an obstacle to understanding, an excuse for not sorting out the here and the now. More practically, if something needed fixing, it just seemed smarter to try and fix it yourself than leave it to someone you’d never met and who might not show up in any case.

There were two exceptional occasions however when Dan resorted to prayer. The first was any Saturday night when his daughter was out later than they had agreed and hadn’t phoned (which happened so routinely nowadays, God would soon have him down as a new recruit). The second was whenever he went flying. It seemed only logical. At several thousand feet, room for self-help was limited and if there did happen to be Someone up there, you were at least well placed for a hearing.

Today, however, as he tried to hold the Cessna steady in the bruising north wind, Dan didn’t pray for his and Helen’s safety. Looking down at the higher reaches of the Hope Valley, he could see that word of Abe Harding’s alleged losses to the wolves had indeed spread. All along the mountain front, herds were being gathered from their summer allotments. So instead, in a worrying and psalmic extension of normal practice, Dan asked the Lord that all the ranchers he saw down there, on their horses tiny as ticks, would find their cattle had safely grazed.

He watched the plane’s shadow pass over the last of them, then looked ahead again to where the mountains curved away north like a fossilized spine, its vertebrae sprinkled with a first fall of snow. The wind had scoured all residue of summer haze from the sky. It was that kind of limpid, limitless blue that made you feel you could fly to the moon and back if you only had the fuel.

Dan kept his poetry to himself, knowing that in her present state, it would be lost on Helen. She was hunched in the seat beside him, scanning the radio frequencies and hiding her hangover with sunglasses and a faded Minnesota Timberwolves cap. Her face was a grayer shade of green every time he glanced at her.

She had arrived at the airfield in Helena with a large black coffee that she’d stopped for on the way and warned him at once that she was in no mood for jokes. She was in such a fragile state that when they’d picked up the first signal, a couple of miles south-west of Hope, she winced and reached for the volume control.

The signal belonged to the young male and, scanning on, Helen had soon found the mother’s. Both were strongest as the plane crossed Wrong Creek, which was good news, because it meant they were away from the cattle. They seemed to be on the north side of the canyon, probably resting up somewhere, about a mile farther up from where Helen had trapped the male. But in the three passes they had so far made, they hadn’t been able to spot them.

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